Friday, December 2, 2016

Grandma and child illustration

I've picked up a little more illustration work with my job at Deseret News. This one ended up being for online only. If you would like to read the story, written by Daphne Chen, associated with this illustration, here is a link. The story revolves around our nation and state's ever-growing population problem stemming from low birth rates. Here comes the demographic winter.

About this illustration

The writer provided me with a stock image. I took this into Illustrator and created many many vector shapes. It is a paint-by-numbers approach, but I like the simplified results derived from it. Obviously there is some creativity in making decisions about placement and color of shapes. For example, there is always additional creative judgement that needs to be made with human faces. Shapes and shadows on faces are almost never cut and dry. In the case of the grandma, especially, I had to alter some shapes and colors to make her look less creepy.

Below you can see the result before taking it into Photoshop.

The emotional payoff

Below is a detail showing in greater detail the shapes of the figures. All in all the work in illustrator represents between 2 and 3 hours.

My feelings as I go through this meticulous work could be comparable to coloring in an adult coloring page, with all its hundreds if not thousands of cells. For some reason it is relaxing, calming and rewarding on some fundamental emotional level.


Finishing in Photoshop

It should be noted that I don't just do a straight copy and paste to Photoshop of the entire illustration. I organize in Illustrator using layers, based on background, midground, foreground and the central figures of this rendering. Then I copy and paste one by one into photoshop so as to create layers which can be edited separately.

Below is the final result after applying some creative texturing and blurring, in photoshop. I deliberately left the central figures alone, in the hope that their increased simplicity will draw attention to them. I think it does just that in a very pleasant way.

What do you think? Let me know. Have a good day, and God bless.

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